The Wicked Wand

by Steve Shilstone

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BLURB:

Bekka, in your 6th chronicle, The Wicked Wand, please heed the warning of your best friend Kar. Be satisfied with your new collection of 22 magic rings. Don’t try to find the hiding place of the Wand just because it, too, now belongs to you. It’s dangerous. You know it. Kar knows it. You say you can control it. Kar doubts that deeply, but she will help if you insist on going. She won’t allow you to travel alone on your quest even though she thinks it foolish. You’re lucky to have a friend like Kar, and soon, oh soon, you’ll know why.

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Excerpt:

Up and up the mountain we went. Its snowy white peak yet loomed above us. The winds grew colder and rougher. I had to hold onto my hat. My hair flew into my face, surprising me with its black stringiness. So such, I’d been accustomed to my life-long bendo dreen coppery hair. My cloak flapped and snapped. Up and up. I squinted and grimaced. The top. The rim. Where was it? I tucked in close behind Kar, so such providing myself with fat yellow Dragon protection from the wind. I followed her undulating tail. Below, a blanket of white snow covered the mountainside. I shifted my gaze to Kar’s flapping wings. Up and up she climbed. At last there was sky and a rush of peace. No wind. No cold. We had arrived above the ever-blooming springtime of Orrun Mountain Hollow.

“Sarajandos,” I gasped.

“Sarajandos,” echoed Kar.

The plateau in the bowl of Orrun Mountain Hollow offered a wonderful view of sarajando trees, white with blossoms, and fields of lush green grasses sprinkled with yellow and purple dots of flowers. The cherry vanilla scent of the sarajando blossoms perfumed the air all around us. And the road. There was the road! Round green cobbles made a stripe along the floor of the Hollow. The road led to Cloud Castle City. Oh, the Gwer drollek stories! Cloud Castle City! The troll brought the wand here! I dropped low to the road and raced along it. Whiz! I cackled. Ahead. Ahead. Ahead I saw the famous Crag of Orrun Mountain rising above the rim on the far side of the Hollow. Cloud Castle City nestles under the Crag. Cloud Castle City. Cloud …

“It’s … It’s … It’s …,” I said.

“Not here,” completed Kar beside me.

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AUTHOR Bio and Links:

Born in Louisville, Kentucky, Steve moved as a toddler with his family to Denver, Colorado, where his passion for books was sparked early by such titles as McElligot’s Pool, The Little House, Little Toot, and more. His father’s employment with the Pennsylvania Railroad had the family moving to Seattle, Washington when Steve was 10. There he dragged home an armload of books every week from the library. He plowed through the Oz books, the horse books, and the dog books while maintaining vast stacks of comic books, mainly Little Lulu and Scrooge McDuck. It was at this time that he wrote his first piece, something called ‘Art Ant Off To War’.

Lo, the teenage years raged in and found Steve’s family – an older brother, a younger brother, a father and a mother – plunked down for good in Redwood City, California on the San Francisco peninsula. Now Steve’s reading frenzy really kicked into high gear. He buzzsawed through all of Dickens and all of Tolstoy in addition to his regular mound of scifi and fantasy and Moby Dick on the side. Trapped in the tentacles of teenageritis, he wrote stories with titles like ‘The Coffin’ and ‘The Guillotine’. Anguished poetry was a given.

Steve eventually attended and graduated from UCLA with a degree in Anthropology, and following that, gave thanks for the asthma which exempted him from a trip to Vietnam. From then until on, he painted and wrote, observed hippiedom with interest from the sidelines, distributed mail for the United States Postal Service, unloaded trucks and worked in the stockrooms of various Mervyn’s department stores, coached youth baseball for a quarter of a century, and became parental. He also finally got around to reading Ulysses by James Joyce, thereby freeing his writing self from the shackles of convention.

His baseball novel, Chance, debuted in 1996. His middle grade fantasy e-book series, The Bekka Chronicles, began appearing in 2010. He lives sometimes in Redwood City, sometimes at South Lake Tahoe. He continues to play with words. His child of hippies novel, CHILDREN OF VINEYARD, is due out in 2014 from Livingston Press.

Links

Email: steve@steveshilstone.com

Website: http://steveshilstone.com/

eBook Blog: http://bekkaofthorns.com/

dada Humor Blog: http://dochortonsloondiary.com/

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Steve-Shilstone/e/B001K8PI0S/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_2?qid=1364570861&sr=8-2

Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/878076.Steve_Shilstone

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SteveShilstone

Twitter: https://twitter.com/steveshilstone

G+: https://plus.google.com/106099026541084889139/

Purchase Steve’s Books from Wild Child: http://www.wildchildpublishing.com/index.php?main_page=advanced_search_result&search_in_description=1&keyword=steve+shilstone

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